Mid 265 Summer
"Welcome to Rockhall." I announced to my new Glover wife as I opened the oak and iron door to my home under a stone hill.
Now hold up, I'm starting this story after I got married. What am I thinking? Where's the tension and the romantic subplots and the coming of age? Well, when you're reborn as Jorah Mormont all you got is your word, your nuts, and a dad looking to bail ASAP cause he's just as miserable ruling this frozen rock as he thinks you're going to be.
So it's a good thing the super power I got with this reincarnation was a really nice pair of testicles. Just the gold finger I need to take my barren island full of perpetually shit faced fishermen and make a run for worlds strongest fief. My extra creamy loads will deliver me and my people from eight thousand years of poverty.
Not.
As for why my story starts with me already hitched, well, Jorah Mormont was noted for being wed quite young in the books that explore the world I am currently living in. Now, this is a world where fourteen year olds are expected to go to war, get married, then get murdered by Freys, so being notably young when married is quite the accomplishment.
I am currently eleven.
Same age Harry Potter was when his story started and if it's good enough for HP it's good enough for me. Fortunately for me, my really nice nuts came in clutch and the noble class of Westeros are built different, and by that I mean they produce enough growth hormone to melt the piss test cup. All that high quality GH and Test boosting a body works wonders.
So what I'm trying to say is, even though I was eleven I was six feet tall, broad in shoulder and hip, and already dealing with the encroachment of the body hair that you'd occasionally read about during a Daenerys PoV. All that, and I have a dangling pipe that I'm already like 'Yo, this is enough', but puberty is like, 'Nah man, fuck enough. Dis dick gonna be a problem you cannot conceal.'
At least the newly minted Alysa Mormont had nothing to complain about during the bedding. Nothing to complain about other than getting shucked off to Bear Island, but at nineteen she'd grin and bear it cause she's getting up into spinster territory.
The pack of dogs following us produced choreographed barks to go with my grand announcement. The black and white bear hunting hounds weren't known for complicated tricks or being cool with new people, so the fact that I have them show ready is big money in the land where nobody has any money.
Those dogs were damn important too for the protection of my wife's dowry of fifty sheep and a hundred chickens. A beautiful big money wife in these lands where nobody has any money is usually two hundred sheep or a hundred head of cattle. Considering the rocky hills and forests of my homeland, the surefooted sheep were the better bet, and considering the quality of the few shepherds living under Mormont rule, dumping a full two hundred on those drunk simpletons at once would collapse the bubble of their feeble capabilities. At least the chickens were easily scalable for us, even if their value didn't even cover near the same price as the sheep expected in a union between two of the 'principle' houses of the North, but perhaps a good near insult for a near spinster and her stubborn and willful child of a husband.
Rockhall is the love child of my stubbornness and willfulness. Beyond the oak and iron doors hinged deeply into the rocky face of this seaside hill lay an entry hall with plaster walls painted cream and clad in red oak, illuminated in glow of lanterns and polished copper reflection. The floor consisted of interlocking tiles of white, gold, and red oak.
My life spent as a carpenter came in quite handy for a life with little but wood, bears, and fish in it. I'd spent years carving out the limestone that formed the shell of my home, something that started as therapeutic, but then turned into a glorious purpose. It became far easier for me to deal with the people of Bear Island with a genial smile on my face once I committed to spending hours each day creating a more squared off version of Bag End for me to live in one day.
Like Bilbo, I just wanted people to fuck off.
Not everyone, but just everyone who would hear about the 'wolf blood' of the Starks and think that's cool rather than an inherent failure in parenting to curb the self destructive entitled tendencies of a child. Them, and dumb people.
So basically everyone I've met growing up except the Maester who educated me a few hours each day until I was eight and he ran out of things to teach me, and the old woman I hired as housekeeper for Rockhall. Her being the only woman I interviewed for the position who politely asked me if I would like to fuck her granddaughters rather than try to entice me to do it.
Quite a wild world we live in where a ten year old sets off seeking an elderly housekeeper for his expanding estate and is waylaid by wenches on all sides. The thots thought they could trap me, but I was sly to the game and half those girls gave birth within eight moons of my passing. I leapt over the low cunning of the hos with discipline and prevented them from passing some loser's sprog as mine.
There's not much to do on this isle except work, drink, and fuck. And apparently plotting to cuck kids.
My housekeeper, Birgitte, a woman in her fifties greeted us as she wiped her hands on a rag hung from her apron.
"I expected the marriage bed wouldn't hold you from breaking your fast." the salt and pepper haired woman chuckled, "Food will be served soon."
"Excellent timing, Birgitte." I nodded and took Alysa's hand to take her into the parlor off the entry hall.
I always made sure not to thank her for the work she does. It's low class. You thank your social peers and superiors, not anyone else. Being twofaced like that rubbed me the wrong way growing up. I spent my whole life being the same guy no matter who I am talking too, and now I was supposed to not thank the lady that makes my food and cleans my house, but I'm supposed to socially suck the cocks of a family of imbeciles whose demise I got to enjoy in both literary and television form.
An utter travesty.
At least I was free to say things like 'good job' and the like as some means to communicate my gratitude to the woman who frees me up to perform more important work. I'm one of the few people on this island with genuine free time. The vast majority are so wrapped up in fighting off the cold and hunger that little else matters. As such I am one of the few people available for productive work such as building my lovely home, paving the path to it, putting up a signal fire watching the coast for the occasional Wildling or Ironborn raiders we may have to deal with.
I also happen to be the only one willing to engage in productive ventures. The rest of the Mormonts are reactive. Be it bears, raiders, winter its always on the back foot. I get it though, I'm not judging them for it. If making money in Westeros was as easy as going to your local Grey Rat and telling him some barely remembered processes to make glass and whiskey the world wouldn't be such a harsh to scrabble place. First off, liquor exists in this world, and it is considered foreign Essosi pisswater, and if you cracked the 'secret' of glass the Myrish would kill you and they have the best crossbows in the world and more money than they know what to do with.
What I would give to have a genuine Myrish crossbow when I need to put a bear down... or a person.
The second room in my house contained the first fireplace, wide and made of burnt bricks run in a simple stretcher bond up to the ceiling with a double course arch around the mouth of the fire box. The simple and stout wood chairs around it bore wool padding and blankets and came with end tables. A half dozen wood tankards near a raised barrel of mead indicated what the people in this room should be doing, and on the floor a pair of bear skin rugs. Even in my own home I can't get away from these animals.
At least there is no shortage of bear grease on Bear Island. That stuff is life saving.
"This is a very fine hall, husband." Alysa stated and for all her plainness, her voice sent shivers up my spine.
My wife stood a couple of inches taller than me, and skinny too. Like they don't have enough to eat in Deepwood Motte. This did not endow her with bountiful bedroom assets, but her voice is a damn near ringer Claudia Black when she voiced Morrigan in Dragon Age. Talking with her is going to be a trial of endurance and discipline as my raging wiener tries to burst through my pants like a xenomorph popping a chest.
Be still boner-kun, I have much work that needs doing.
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I've got literary obligations and what not, but right now I've been trying to write my other stories for a month. Two of which I now have planned to their conclusions. And for the life of me I could not muster the capacity to want to write those stories. I could not give a fuck.
I've been trying to find the magic premise to get me to the top of the popularity charts like all those other stories on this platform where every chapter is full of negative comments on how much the story sucks, and the character sucks, and the grammar sucks but everyone still dumps their powerstones on them because the premise is interesting.
All my chapters are full of almost nothing but praise, and I can't seem to break the top thirty most days. So fuck it. I'm just going to write stories that I want to write rather than stories I think are going to get clicks.
I spent literally a week thinking about this story and I was able to plan it out pretty much start to finish, and I have themes to explore beyond my general vitriol for the tropes of the Westeros Isekai story. I was worried I didn't have anything more than my burning hatred for North Wank fics where some asswipe author who knows less than Jon Snow about the setting yet believes his character can remember every step in the Agricultural Revolution builds cities and castles using the mountains of gold he generates via alcohol and glass. Like all that shit just works.
I have nothing against stories where things work out. In fact, I hate stories that just pile on misery like that somehow makes it worth reading.
This specific story, is going to explore what it would actually look like to go rags to bitches in the North.
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